Another long post, but many discussion points about the Year of Writing Project that I’ve attempted two years in a row, and will be attempting again for the third year in a row for 2016.
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Okay, so the 2015 Year of Writing didn’t go anywhere near as well as planned (2014’s, I try not to remember). For one, I pretty much didn’t write anything for 4 months straight. From March to June, the chart shows mostly zeros, except for nearly four thousand words spread through the month of May. I’ll post a picture of the chart at the end of the month. It’s in Excel, so it’s a bit complicated, but it works for me. However, I have added something like 120K words to my collective words written since I started paying attention, and that’s something. (as of today, that is.)
Beyond the fact that I’ve only ever really managed to hold myself to a daily writing schedule for NaNoWriMo events – I generally suck at it for more than about a week at a time. I had managed five days straight of daily writing at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, and then four days I didn’t write. There’s no pattern. Four on, four off, two on, two off, three on, one off, one on, two off, etc.
I also set the daily word count goal a little high for the first bit, I think. It’s approachable with a NaNoWriMo plan, but I’m not entirely sure I could manage that quite that close to actual NaNoWriMo without having properly built up to a number like that. 1500 per day after a NaNoWriMo that I had struggled in? Not happening, especially not after what happens every December (family holidays, and if you were here for the last post, you’ve a better understanding). I could probably hit 1k days regularly, though, if I were seriously trying.
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For 2016 – I’m planning on a few changes. I’m going to dedicate to 5 days of 1kdays a week, generally monday through friday. And on Saturdays and Sundays, I’ll aim a bit higher. By higher, I’m aiming to add at least 250 words to the base wordcount for each number of weekend. This means that for every 4th weekend, I should be adding an additional 1k words to the base word count for that month. In the months with five weekends, it’ll be (MONTHLY WORDCOUNT+1,250) per sat and sun on that 5th weekend. So the fifth weekend in January 2016? I should be writing 2,250 words on each sat and sun.
If I’m really lucky, and can stay on this plan, I should be commonly rocking 3kdays on average during nanowrimo, if not more. My personal goal for the 2016 NaNoWriMo will be 75K, but I’m hoping to actually see a 6 digit number. (I could see as high as 125K, actually. I just did the math.)
Am I going to let myself go through the whole four months of no writing again? I’m going to try not to let that happen again. At most, I’ll try to only allow for a week at a time where I don’t write something new But, during those times, I’ll try to increase my level of knowledge in something else. (Linguistics, physics, astrophysics, French, Irish, video editing, sound editing, image editing, etc.) I’ll also work on my research. I’ve got lots of things to learn for some of my stories, and lots of things to develop off of what we know right now. Science is a fun thing.
2016 will be a year that I add at least 200,000 words to my overall word count. I intend to do this. I can do this.